Urban Land Use Planning

Published in: Origin Spatial Development of Contemporary Poland in Łódź University Geographical Research, edited by T.MarszałUrban land-use planning is still one of the key questions in research conducted by the Faculty of Geography at the University of Łódź. The particular character of works conducted in Łódź derives from the strong emphasis which is put on their practical application; the basis of many publications is the need to solve emerging practical problems. It also means constant cooperation with local administration, urban planners and other people involved in the practical activity, which is easier thanks to the fact that many members of the local administration staff are graduates from the Faculty of Geography in Łódź. A serious difficulty in preparing this chapter laid in choosing appropriate publications which, due to the limited capacity, were chosen subjectively and selectively, and were classified ambiguously. An indisputable gap was left in reference to the data and research results that had never been published. Nevertheless, they constitute a great number of works created by staff members of the Faculty of Geography, adding up to over 30%. 1 It is also worth mentioning that many studies have been carried out as responses to particular needs of certain organizations, or ordered by local or national administration, as well as state institutions involved in land-use planning in Poland. The cooperation is usually temporary, based on handling particular works and achieving specific goals. They result in preparing e.g. development strategies (e.g. in towns of Inowrocław and Uniejów), projects of new administrative division (dividing Łódź into local units, delimitation of the Łódź Voivodship), land use inventory (e.g. in Aleksandrów Łódzki), city revitalisation conceptions (e.g. Pabianice), experts’ reports on changing administrative borders (Szadek, Skierniewice), cooperation of metropolitan areas (Łódź and Warsaw) and many more. Undoubtedly, the above proves the great value of the competences of the Faculty of Geography staff members

The Role of the Built Environment in Human Life. Selected Issues

This article attempts to outline the nature of research on space urbanised by people and to determine the four main fields of research aimed at the problems of man and the built environment. In the next part, particular attention is paid to issues related to the impact of the built environment on the life of its residents in order to highlight the particular role and complexity of this area of research. This study, acting as a kind of test of the research, cannot be considered representative. Nevertheless, the analysis prompts several reflections on the current and future role of the built environment in the development of our civilisation, as well as further challenges related to it

Improving Reachability and Navigability in Recommender Systems

In this paper, we investigate recommender systems from a network perspective and investigate recommendation networks, where nodes are items (e.g., movies) and edges are constructed from top-N recommendations (e.g., related movies). In particular, we focus on evaluating the reachability and navigability of recommendation networks and investigate the following questions: (i) How well do recommendation networks support navigation and exploratory search? (ii) What is the influence of parameters, in particular different recommendation algorithms and the number of recommendations shown, on reachability and navigability? and (iii) How can reachability and navigability be improved in these networks? We tackle these questions by first evaluating the reachability of recommendation networks by investigating their structural properties. Second, we evaluate navigability by simulating three different models of information seeking scenarios. We find that with standard algorithms, recommender systems are not well suited to navigation and exploration and propose methods to modify recommendations to improve this. Our work extends from one-click-based evaluations of recommender systems towards multi-click analysis (i.e., sequences of dependent clicks) and presents a general, comprehensive approach to evaluating navigability of arbitrary recommendation networks

Elderly People in the Historic Urban Core of Łódź. Spatial Context

In this paper spatial patterns of ageing inhabitants of the Historic Urban Core of Łódź is subjected to analysis. The city of Łódź is strongly affected by depopulation and is characterized by a growing share of old inhabitants. The aim of the study is to analyze spatial distribution of the population aged 60+ in the central part of Łódź. The results suggest that this relatively small part of urban territory is characterized by significant internal variations in population according to age. Disparities observed in refrence to the share of the oldest old may indicate that spatial segregation processes are affecting this age group.Rozważania podjęte w prezentowanym artykule koncentrują się na problemie starzenia się mieszkańców śródmiejskiego obszaru Łodzi. Miasto to należy do grona jednostek osadniczych szczególnie mocno dotkniętych procesem depopulacji. Jednocześnie populację Łodzi cechuje znaczący wzrost udziału osób najstarszych wśród mieszkańców. Skala tych zjawisk wymaga poszukiwania i wdrażania rozwiązań poprawiających m.in. jakość życia obecnych i nowych mieszkańców miasta. Celem badań jest analiza przestrzennego rozkładu populacji osób w wieku 60+ w centralnej części Łodzi. Jej wyniki wskazują m.in., że ta stosunkowo niewielka część terytorium miasta cechuje się istotnym wewnętrznym zróżnicowaniem populacji wg wieku, a dysproporcje w udziale osób najstarszych wśród ogółu populacji mogą wskazywać na kształtujące się procesy segregacji przestrzennej tej grupy wiekowej

Clonal dynamics and tumor cell heterogeneity in colorectal cancer

Colon cancers are composed of phenotypically heterogeneous tumor cell subpopulations with variable expression of putative stem cell and differentiation antigens. While in normal colonic mucosa clonal repopulation occurs among differentiation gradients from crypt base towards crypt apex, the clonal architecture of colon cancer and the relevance of tumor cell subpopulations for clonal outgrowth are poorly understood. In the first study of this thesis, we used a multicolor lineage tracing approach in colon cancer xenografts that reflect primary colon cancer architecture. With this method, we could demonstrate that clonal outgrowth is mainly driven by tumor cells located at the leading tumor edge with clonal axis formation towards the tumor center. Our findings suggest that in colon cancer tumor cell position may be more important for clonal outgrowth than tumor cell phenotype. In a second study we analyzed colon cancer cells with high WNT signaling activity. This characteristic overactivation in colorectal cancers is caused by pathway activating mutations and drives tumor progression and metastasis. Here, we could identify pre-leukemia transcription factor 3 (PBX3) as a gene regulated in part by WNT signaling in colon cancers and assess its prognostic value. In a colon cancer case collection, PBX3 expression correlated with nuclear β-catenin and high PBX3 levels were associated with decreased patient survival and an increased risk for tumor relapse and metastasis. Additionally, an independent case control study confirmed the association of high PBX3 expression and colon cancer metastasis to the liver. Further studies provide evidence that PBX3 is also regulated by EMT. Knockdown and overexpression studies modifying the EMT transcriptions factors SNAIL and ZEB1 as well as PBX3 demonstrated that PBX3 is part of an EMT-regulatory network in colorectal cancer. Taken together the results of these two studies may have implications for the cancer stem cell hypothesis, reveal new aspects of tumor cell heterogeneity in colorectal cancer, and could furthermore give insights for the design of new therapeutic strategies